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Ask any fan of the red and white half of Sydney about the 2016 AFL Final and watch the smile slip away from their face. Last year’s minor premiers had one hand on the trophy after a stellar season that saw them dominate the league from start to finish. However, what would have been their third AFL flag in the club’s history was snatched from under their feet by a gallant Western Bulldogs outfit who managed to claim their first premiership in over fifty years.

In 2017, things went from bad to worse for Sydney and the side endured the club’s worst start in 24 years. The Swans lost their first six games of the season and headed into round seven with a percentage of 76.6 and found themselves 24 points behind league leaders the Adelaide Crows. In comparison, the South Australian team had a percentage of 160.9 and had scored 806 points to Adelaide’s 454.

This came as quite a shock to their loyal supporters who assumed that their club would start the new campaign in the same fashion as they played last season. Most pundits wrote the team off and claimed that they would not have any influence in this year’s competition. How wrong they were.

The Swans decided to take fate into their own hands and completely turned their season around. They went on to win the next 14 out of a possible 16 games and secured themselves a place in this year’s finals. That same team that had a percentage difference of 84.3 compared to top-of-the-table Adelaide finished off the normal season with an outstanding 126; only ten behind the Crows.

It’s no secret that Don Pyke’s men from South Australia have been the dominant side all year and have constantly set the bench mark for how teams need to perform if they wish to challenge for the flag. However, due to the lack of consistency from other top-eight clubs, footy fans have struggled to find a genuine contender to challenge Adelaide for the title.

Sydney seems to be the team that has answered the call and are now looking like genuine title contenders. Bookmakers still think that the Crows will lift the trophy though, and have them as favourites at $3.40 with the Swans steadily creeping up behind them at $5.00.

There’s no doubt it will be a gruelling final series and injuries will surely play a large part in the outcome of both side’s Grand Final hopes. Some punters may want to grab some free advice from one of the online tipping sites such as https://www.championbets.com.au/ to ensure they are up to date with all available players and squad selection.

The Swans defeated the Crows in round 22 at the Adelaide Oval, and that will have given them a huge psychological advantage if the two teams happen to meet on their path to the Grand Final. Sydney better be careful, though, because this is an Adelaide side that absolutely has nothing but revenge on the agenda for a team that has scorned them on the last two occasions.

OK, so you have read up on our previous article about customising your finals here and have decided to give it a go. Lets say you want to run your finals series one week earlier than the standard final 4 rounds, for clarity, lets call that ‘Round 19’.

But who can be shagged with manually calculating who plays who and manually keying in all those games…? Well not us, and we assume not you either so we have built a tool to help called the “Game Builder Wizard”.

To setup your finals to run 1 week earlier than the final 4 rounds, you need to first setup the following:

On your League Edit page (advanced tab), set the “First Finals Round” setting to the round that you will run your first final, ie. round 19. This setting controls which rounds are considered when updating your ladder. The ladder positions at the end of the standard home and away season is used to determine the games in the finals so you don’t want it to change while the finals are being played, otherwise your finals will get buggered up.

On your Competition Edit page, you need to set the “Finals Model” setting to”None/Custom”. This will tell the system to no create the normal finals games automatically and instead hand the keys over to you to control.

On the Fixutre page, you will find and “Edit Games” link under the list of games for each round. By default, the system has probably creates a set of games in round 19. Click the “Edit Games” link and delete all of the games, leaving it blank.

Now you just need to play the season as normal until the last round of your home and away season, ie. round 18, is complete.

With round 18 complete, you can now go to the Fixture page and click “Edit” again for Round 19, to setup your finals games.

If there are any games still in Round 19, delete them (but you should have done that already in step 3). Deleting the first will enable the link to the “Game Builder Wizard”. Click on the link and the system will open up a page to help you automatically create the finals games.

The wizard will give you two criteria to pick from:

Game Style: this is the style or format of the games that are to be created. eg. to setup the games for round 1 or a finals series, choose “Finals Round 1”. Similarly, next week for a second round of finals, you would choose “Finals Round 2”.

Participating Clubs: this option lets you choose the number of clubs you want to be involved. If you are running a finals series with the top 5 clubs in your 12 club competition for example, choose 5.

The system will show you a preview of the proposed games on the right. If you are happy with the games, just hit Save and the games will be locked in. You can even then go back in to the Fixture edit page and tweek the games further or even add some extra games for the bottom rankers.

The Game Builder Wizard will always try to merge any existing games but we aware that the Game Builder Wizard will delete any games featuring the Clubs that it cares about. You will see the warning on the screen if this happens.

Another thing to remember is that you need to wait for a round to complete (ie. all the real games have been played) before setting up the next round. This is because for finals games, the Wizard will use the results from the previous round to determine who plays who in the next.

As has been well documented, more than once, the once glorious bombers, previously known for flying up, up have hit a wee snag this year. Thirty-four players of their 2012 team have had to take their metaphorical medicine (bad pun I know!) and sit on the side-lines for the 2016 season. Some of the players no-longer play or now play for other AFL teams. The key point being… DON’T PICK THEM!

Of those still playing, here is a list of the banned players to avoid for 2016:

We have just launched a brand new feature on the bench called the Premiership Wager.

The Premiership Wager lets you put a bet on the outcome of your season long fantasy Competition. All of the coaches submit their wager through the site which forms your competitions prize pool. At the end of the season, the winner of the Competition will get their prize paid straight into their betting account.

As a Competition Manager, you have probably been doing this yourself and so would know of the hassle of having to collect the entry fee from your coaches, chasing up the late payers, sticking the cash somewhere (so you don’t spend it) and then paying it out at the end of the year.

As a Coach, you might know the joy of winning the season, only to have to wait for the last of the late payers to pay their way or for your competition manager to put his hand in his pocket, before you get your cash.

Well now, the Premiership Wager can take all of that hassle away for you and manage your competitions prizes.

Check out the video above for a sneak peak into the Premiership Wager.

As the Competition Manager, all you need to do to setup the Premiership Wager is pick the entry fee amount and the split of the prize pool between the winner and runner-up – that’s it.

The Coaches will receive an email with all of the details can can simply click the link and pay through the site.

The cash gets stored in a trust account for the year and upon your Premier being decided, will be automatically transferred to the winner and runner-ups account.

To try to keep on top of late payers (all Competitions have them, and you know who you are!), when you have the Premiership Wager running, all Coaches must have joined the Premiership Wager before they can submit their team. Coaches will continue to be locked out from submitting their team until they have either paid or we hit round 3 after which time the betting pool is closed. After round 3, all Coaches will be able to enter a team however only those who joined the Premiership Wager will be eligible for the prize pool.

If you want to learn more, you can have a look at the rule of the site here.

Perhaps the biggest out is Juddy with a career ending dicky knee on the weekend against the Crows – good luck Juddy, you are a legend. Brodie Grundy had a scare in a big hit at training on Friday morning but been cleared of serious head and neck injury but will be doubtful for the weekend. Some other outs include Dale Thomas with an in-grown toe-nail, Jarrad Waite doubtful with a Hip and Ben McGlynn with a ham-sandwich.